Echo
Portrayed by Eliza Dushku, Echo is the main character of Dollhouse. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with identities, personalities, skills, and memories in order to be sent into the world on engagements. Between engagements they live in the Dollhouse with no memory of their pasts or knowledge of their futures. In this child-like state Echo begins to become self-aware and to search for answers about who she is. Character development Background Before Echo was recruited as a Doll, her name was Caroline Farrell. A file held by Adelle DeWitt suggests that Caroline's past was "a mess." After a 5-year tenure with the Dollhouse, it is promised that this will be taken care of. Caroline expresses her intent to "make a difference" and refers to a female figure in her life. They allude to the consequences of something Caroline has done or failed to do in an attempt to make a difference, which appears to be the mess DeWitt is using to pressure Caroline into signing on as a doll. In "Echoes", Echo's life as Caroline is revealed. She was a student at Freemont College, where she tried to stop animal experimentation in the Rossum lab. While video taping caged animals with her boyfriend, they were caught by security and her boyfriend was killed in the attempt to escape. This led to DeWitt finding Caroline and offering her a position as an Active. In "Omega", we see Caroline's first viewing of the Dollhouse which she describes as being like 'walking to the gallows', and describes the Actives around her as being 'zombies'. Later, in Echo's earliest days, she is kissed by the Active Alpha who is infatuated with her; his handler tries to discourage this behaviour, which Dolls ought to be incapable of. Then, when Alpha overhears the handler Sophie Alvarez describe Whiskey as the "number one" Active, he attacks her face with pruning shears so that Echo can claim the number one space. In the ensuing massacre after the composite event in which Alpha has 48 personalities downloaded into his brain, he spares Echo's life before his escape. Season One In the series premiere "Ghost"In the original pilot, "Echo", Paul Ballard gains possession of a picture showing a sorority girl called Caroline, a clue Alpha left to aid his search for the Dollhouse. After Adelle DeWitt finds out about the picture, she sends Echo on an engagement to get rid of Paul. Paul realizes that Echo looks exactly like Caroline. Pretending to be looking for a missing sister, Echo tries to find out how much he knows about the Dollhouse, but she gets mad and has to shoot him. Surprisingly, Paul survives and Echo heads off to "finish the job" in the hospital, but gets stopped by Boyd. It remains unclear why she didn't kill Paul although she had the necessary knowledge imprinted, and she starts to wonder about the name "Caroline" in her wiped state. Echo faces two engagements: one as a dream date, and one as an expert hostage negotiator. She finds herself in danger when a client decides to hunt her down in "The Target" to see if she deserves the right to live. Echo is regarded as one of "the best" Actives in the Dollhouse's possession, and is very popular with clients. However, Echo, like Alpha before her, is a very peculiar Doll in that she is able to work outside the parameters or her programming, to defy imprinting, and to carry residual memories from her imprinted state when inactive. While drugged with psychedelic drugs in "The Target," Echo, in the personality of Jenny, begins to see apparitions of past personalities - including the original Caroline - despite the fact that these personalities are supposed to have been "wiped" clean. From the encounter with Richard Connell in the same episode, she learns his mantra "shoulder to the wheel" and its accompanying gesture, slapping one's shoulder; in her inactive state, she echos his gesture. Despite being imprinted with a permanent trust in and dependence on Boyd, when he asks her "Do you trust me?", she turns it around on him and asserts herself, asking the same of him. In the next episode, "Stage Fright," Echo and new Active Sierra begin to develop a friendship in the confines of the Dollhouse, and there are signs of this when they encounter one another as their imprinted personalities, Jordan and Audra. When Jordan encounters Boyd, as well as Sierra's handler, Joe Hearn, she quickly voices her dislike and distrust of him; as Echo and Sierra once again, Echo shakes her head at Sierra to not speak to her in the presence of Sierra's handler, due to that residual distrust. Boyd and Dr. Saunders discuss Echo's unique brilliance, having found a more effective and radical means of fulfilling her mission outside the confines of her imprint, and worry that being too good might not be a good thing for her. Echo's friendship has now extended to Victor and the three dolls have been observed to eat together regularly, a event that Topher dismisses as instinctual herding patterns. Her new friends were put in danger in "Man on the street" when Victor was accused of raping Sierra. It was ultimately proven by Boyd and possibly Echo as well (who had noted that Sierra was crying a lot before going to sleep) that the true culprit was Sierra's handler. In this episode, she also displayed compassion and concern for her friends when she provided information to the Dollhouse staff on Sierra's situation, and listened to Victor when he was confused by the Dollhouse staff's motivation behind questioning him. She even asked frequently where Victor had been taken during Boyd's plan, showing concern for his safety. Also in this episode, she was sent to frame Paul for shooting a police officer, but due to an unknown person secretly grafting information onto her imprint, she told him the Dollhouse was real (and there is more than one) and told him to find the truth of its purpose. After an incident in "Echoes", where Echo as Alice went off-mission to the scene of Caroline's original capture, the Dollhouse's Dr. Saunders devised a plan to give the Actives a sense of closure about their past lives and hopefully prevent future glitching. In "Needs", Echo along with Victor, Sierra, November and Mike woke up in their original personalities but without their original memories and were allowed by the Dollhouse to attempt a jailbreak so that they could find their closure in the real world. Caroline however, chose to re-enter the Dollhouse and forced Adelle at gunpoint to release the Actives, before passing out and being returned to her Echo personality once closure was reached. However, in the next episode, "A Spy in the House of Love", they discover that Echo still seems to want to save everyone. Echo insists (to Topher's shock) that he imprints her with a detective spy-hunter personality so that she can uncover the mole within the Dollhouse, and due to this deduction, she is later able to conclude that Dominic is the NSA mole within the Dollhouse. While in-persona as the spy hunter, she remembers Dominic's previous attempt on her life and asserts confidently to him that she is "not broken". DeWitt is amazed by Echo's capacity for deductive reasoning and rather than let Topher scrub her again, she decides to let Echo continue evolving as she believes Echo will again save the Dollhouse. By contrast, Dominic forewarns that Echo will one day bring the place down. In "Briar Rose", Echo is sleeping when Paul infiltrates the Dollhouse, helped by Alpha, pretending to be Steven Kepler. Paul wakes her up in the pod room, but is stopped by Boyd. Paul and Boyd fight while Paul tries to drag Echo out of the Dollhouse. During the fight, Echo accesses her previous imprints and uses her fighting skills to push Paul off the stairs. With Paul captured, Alpha takes Echo to the imprinting room where he imprints her with the personality of Crystal, the girlfriend to his Bobby personality who is easily manipulated and who, partly, he is fond of. After the imprint, they kiss passionately, and she calls Alpha "my prince." They leave the Dollhouse together. In "Omega", Alpha/Bobby and Crystal are beginning to relive their glory days and have begun a crime spree again, but Alpha's other personalities have more pressing concerns. They have kidnapped a girl called Wendy as part of a scheme to force Echo to evolve much like Alpha has done. Alpha places the Caroline personality into Wendy so that he can confront her about her abandonment of Echo; the personality disowned the soul as much as the mind did the body. Alpha forces Echo/Crystal into a chair where her 38 previous personalities are downloaded into her at once in a composite event with hopes she can kill Caroline/Crystal and become just like Alpha, like a god or an Übermensch. However, given Caroline/Echo being intrinsically good unlike Alpha's original personality of Carl Craft, she awakens with perfect sanity and defends Caroline/Wendy against Alpha and vows to reunite them in one body. Echo fights Alpha and they are evenly matched. Echo experiences full awareness of herself as 'Echo' but also as something of Caroline and comes to fully understand all the memories of her experiences as a blank state in the Dollhouse. Alpha kills Wendy with a bullet and vows to destroy the saved Caroline personality on the wedge but instead uses it as an aid to bid his getaway, shooting Echo in the shoulder and escaping. After this event, Boyd finds Echo and returns her to the Dollhouse where her wound will be tended to and after her wipe it appears at first she has returned to being the same placid if strangely observant Echo, until later when going to sleep in her pod she whispers the word "Caroline" to herself. As shown in an "Epitaph One" flashback set shortly after "Omega", the Echo consciousness is now fully self-aware and is pretending to be in a blank state to pass by. Using the skills and memories of the extra consciousnesses "added" to her, she is working with Paul Ballard to bring down the Dollhouse and discover more about Caroline. Future In the future shown in "Epitaph One", Echo has been permanently restored to her Caroline identity and Caroline now works as a freedom fighter. In addition, the Caroline personality is also in operation in at least one another body other than Caroline's own. Engagements Notes & References Category:Characters Category:Main characters Category:Characters Category:Main characters Category:Actives